Tag Archives: portland oregon artist

Great News! I’ve been accepted into the winter printmaking residency at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. I’m really excited to spend two weeks in January working on a larger scale woodblock print, have access to state of the art facilities and meet other printmakers. I’ll make sure to post pictures of my trip and my work as they both unfold.

It’s time for another color. I’m getting close to the finish, I just haven’t decided on how many more steps to include. I like to print a color and then ignore the image for a day or so. That way when I come back to the studio all of the ideas that were influenced by the last printing have somewhat evaporated and I can look towards the next step more impartially.

On another note, color-wise, we are getting darker. So todays color is THE closest point of the image to the viewer. In keeping with the red, blue, orange (and the red+blue combo that is purple), I chose a dark, saturated blue.

I mixed a little of the previous purple into the blue and expect the last printing to influence the color as well.

I’ve carved out the rest of the background and some of the waving lines up front that I want to remain purple. Also, I’ve selectively inked the plate to highlight the lighter blue lines in the middle ground and create a water pool as the foreground.

It was actually a relatively light day outside for this time in Portland. Not sunny, not rainy, just not dark and gray. I’ll take it.

Now to forget about it for a couple of days, but first, I want to share a brand new addition to my work space.

I noticed that the prints weren’t drying as well in the cardboard box recently. My wife Alyssa and I chalked it up to how humid the house has been with all the late winter Portland rain. So I made this hanging device. I used hemp twine and binder clips. Both were purchased at SCRAP. The hemp twine I’ve had for a few years and don’t remember how much it was, but the binder clips were something like five cents each. I use that nice green bag to hold all of my binder clips, and as you can see, I cover my work area with tarps when I’m finished for the day. This ensures both cat safety and print safety. I don’t want my little wonders to get into anything I may have missed during cleanup, although I’m pretty thorough, and I don’t want their little hairs all over my work area. Win-Win.

This collage touches on the idea that there are separate realities from ours playing out at the same time, but unseen to our eyes. I tried to imagine what it would be like if they all acknowledged each other. Take, for instance, the movie “Who Framed Rodger Rabbit”. The film portrays a Hollywood in which people coexist with cartoons, and deals with the issues the arise when the unreal becomes real. How would we react? How would the inhabitants of the alternate realities react? Would someone be sectioned off in a ghetto the way the cartoons were to Toon Town? And most importantly, how close are we to seeing these alternate realities, and do we catch glimpses of them out of the corner of our eye on a day to day basis?

For those of you who have never seen “Who Framed Rodger Rabbit” check out the trailer here: